Stay tuned. Very soon I am to start a period of enforced relaxation in the bosom of my family, and I plan to spend a lot of time on the internet and watching daytime television.

Do not be alarmed. This doesn’t mean I’m leaving IT Week to pursue my dream job of working as a researcher on The Jeremy Kyle Show (“This week, ‘I am bored of the fact that my sister is ugly’”).

The truth is I am having an operation, and no, it’s not to remove the TV remote from my hand. However, I do intend to make the most of my time off and conduct some research. But how?

I could start a blog in which I cover issues important to the people in the area where I am staying, but nothing much happens there except people-trafficking and cow vandalism, and no one is interested in reading about that sort of stuff.
I was tempted to try video-blogging, but I suspect that few people would be very interested in seeing a 32-year-old man laze around in bed calling for soup.
My Photoshopping skills (see my blog) could benefit from some practice but I kind of like the naive charm of my current output (see my blog! Go on, please).
So, instead, I am going to work out exactly how all this “watch television programmes on the internet” thing works.

This is fairly new territory for me. So far my experiences of internet TV have been pretty underwhelming. I once tried to view a football match on the internet but it was like watching stop-motion Lego men trying to kick a tiny sheep to death within the confines of a greenish cell.

But, these days, TV on the internet has a definite air of semi-professionalism. I watched the first episode of the new series of Peep Show on Channel 4 last week, and throughout the show adverts reminded me that if I missed it, I could watch it online for the rest of the week ­ even though I was already watching it. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that I want to try the services, in the hope that once I have let them expose themselves to me, they will shut up and leave me alone.

A quick Google finds that there are lots of “unofficial” providers of similar services. These offer television programmes and channels that have not yet been officially launched into cyberspace by their copyright holders. It will be interesting to see how popular legitimate IPTV output becomes, and for how long these pirate broadcasters can hang on.

Users woke up to IPTV a long time ago ­ it is about time the media giants switched on as well. So, welcome to the brave new world. Don’t go flipping.